Five Growth Disciplines Midsize Manufacturers Can Borrow From Collars & Co.

As midsize manufacturers wrestle with rising tariffs, tight labor markets and constant pressure to invest in new capacity, they might do well to take a page from Collar & Co., a fast-growing menswear brand. As founder and CEO, Justin Baer has been making capital, footprint and talent decisions with far less buffer than a typical industrial player, which has forced a level of speed and flexibility many manufacturers struggle to match.

In 2021, Baer was still running a software company when he decided to fix a personal annoyance: the discomfort of wearing a dress shirt under a sweater.  “I thought, ‘I’m gonna make a polo shirt with a firm collar just for fun,’” he recalls. He ordered a run of 300 white shirts, threw up a basic Shopify site, filmed a quick video with his daughter in his closet, and sat down with his wife to watch Netflix.

Before long, his phone started chiming with orders. “I never did any studies. I didn’t ask anybody what they thought of the idea,” he says. “For me it was just a fun hobby. I knew I had the problem and I was like, you know what? If I can’t sell them, I’ll have 300 awesome shirts to wear under my sweaters.”

That “fun hobby” has since grown into a national brand with permanent locations, pop-up stores and a rapidly expanding product line. Along the way, Baer has had to make calls on warehouses, tariffs, store locations and hiring that will sound familiar to any manufacturing chief. The way he has handled them offers five disciplines worth borrowing.

1. Shorten decision cycles around new products.

Baer’s first instinct was to get a real product into customers’ hands and learn from their behavior. “Speed sometimes matters more than perfection,” he says. Instead of waiting to launch “the perfect, perfect polo,” he introduced a single white shirt with basic photography and a straightforward pitch: if you hate wearing dress shirts under sweaters, try this.​

From there, the line expanded one step and one color at a time—blue, then pink, then more—following actual demand rather than a theoretical line plan. For manufacturers, the analog is compressing the loop between idea, trial and data on any new SKU, line extension or configuration. That means carving out capacity and processes for limited runs, setting guardrails on spend and risk, and insisting that debates about new offerings be anchored in what customers buy rather than what well-meaning internal committees predict.​

2. Stage capacity investments instead of betting the plant.

As orders grew, Collars & Co. quickly outgrew its early operational setup and the company is now on its fourth warehouse, says Baer, noting they have moved more than once. “And then we just took the space next to us in our current warehouse…to help us expand.” The facility is about 20 miles north of Washington, D.C., on the Maryland side, close to the company’s home base in Bethesda and its existing warehouse team. ​

Each move reflected what the business needed at that moment. Baer even ruled out a potentially cheaper move to Virginia because of brutal traffic and the impact on his long-tenured warehouse staff: “We’re kind of a family here, so I’m not just going to just pick up and leave.”

Manufacturers adding a second or third facility—or upgrading an existing one—can apply the same discipline. Rather than locking into long, inflexible leases or highly specialized configurations too early, leaders can build in options: modular layouts, staged automation investments, and contracts that allow for expansion or exit so the footprint can evolve with mix, volume and customer expectations.

3. Pilot new formats before you reconfigure the network.

Retail has become a major growth lever for Collars & Co., but Baer talks about his first stores as pilots with clear learning objectives. “The first five stores are really trial stores,” he says. “We’re trying different locations. We’re trying different markets. We’re trying different types of locations—A malls, B malls, shopping centers and suburban retail work. And we’re really getting a better sense of what makes a successful store.”​

The pop-up concept in Rockville, Maryland, near its Bethesda headquarters, has been especially valuable. With someone from the head office on site every day, the team can watch how training, staffing and merchandising play out on the floor. “We are getting just tremendous feedback on the product, on training, what it takes to make a great store,” Baer says; Rockville quickly became the top performer. For manufacturers, the equivalent might be a pilot line, a single reconfigured cell or a limited-production plant applying a new scheduling model. The key is to define what you’re testing, decide in advance how you’ll measure success and be explicit about when a pilot graduates into a standard the rest of the network will follow.​

4. Reassess location strategy as customer demand shifts.

As Collars & Co. has grown, customer behavior has begun to change in ways that are forcing Baer to rethink his footprint. Early on, the company relied on high-foot-traffic centers to get noticed. Now, he’s seeing something different. “We’ve had people drive in from New York and drive in from Columbia, Maryland, and DC and Western Virginia,” he says. “They’re driving upwards of an hour just to come see us.”​

That kind of destination behavior has prompted a fresh look at where the brand really needs to be. “Do we need to be in these A centers with a ton of traffic? Or is our brand at a level yet where we feel like it could be a destination?” Baer asks. For midsize manufacturers, shifting demand can show up as customers willing to tolerate longer lead times for custom work, or asking for more localized service even if the production site is farther away. The lesson is to revisit plant, warehouse and hub locations with an eye on how your best customers actually buy and receive product today, not just on legacy assumptions about proximity and traffic.​

5. Design tariff and talent flexibility into the system.

Baer’s rapid growth has collided with external pressures that many manufacturers know well: tariffs have hit some of his imported products hard. “We’ve had to pivot pretty quickly on our manufacturing,” he says, noting that one of his Brazilian footwear manufacturers was hit with close to a 50-percent tariff. The impact is financial, but Baer also focuses on the management cost. “It’s hard enough to run a business, make great products, have awesome marketing, create fantastic teams,” he says. “To just throw this in there, it’s just like one more thing that takes up bandwidth in our team that’s not about selling amazing products and helping our customers.”​

His response has been to explore other factories and prepare to move production rather than simply absorbing structurally higher costs. He has taken a similar approach with talent. Hiring in the Washington, D.C. area has been “definitely challenging,” especially compared with New York, so he widened the search. “What we’ve been able to do is hire remotely,” Baer says, and the company flies remote employees in regularly to stay connected to the team. Manufacturers have comparable tools—dual sourcing, regional supplier diversification, shared engineering centers, remote technical talent. The point is to build that flexibility before a shock hits, so the senior team can stay focused on customers, operations and growth rather than scrambling to patch holes.​

Baer has been an entrepreneur for a long time, but this is the business where everything has clicked. The difference, he says, starts with the product and is reinforced by how fast the company moves. “I’ve had a bunch of different businesses. This is the one where I’ve really felt like even when we make mistakes, things still work out.”